Before you joined Artifakt, you spent 6 years at Akeneo, another French tech company that has become very successful and raised more than USD 60 million. You were instrumental in building Akeneo’s sales organization and the US expansion of the company. How does one build a powerful software sales machine?
There is nothing magical about it. I joined Akeneo in the early days of the company when there was a team of a handful of people and a beta version of the enterprise software. The first thing I did, of course, was selling the product myself and establishing our presence in France. The second thing was building a sales team and the structures and partnerships necessary to win clients in other markets. The playbook was always the same. In Germany, where we gained traction rapidly, I hired a local sales manager who would first be selling himself and then build a local team. We replicated this pattern for other countries and regions.

And then came the US expansion?
Yes, as soon as the European sales organization was established, I found a replacement for me to head this organization and went to the US, with not much more than a laptop in my arm. The US is a peculiar market, it is very local. What I mean by this is that it is possible for a French or any international company to win clients in the US that are early adopters. But after a while, when you have enough leads and also a stable sales team in the US, you need to give the reins of that team to a US person. A US general manager doesn’t come cheap, but clients prefer to talk to a fellow American. Once we found the general manager, I headed back to France to take over the channel and partnership team, which is a very important distribution channel for software sales.

“Don’t hire successful and experienced salespeople too early.”

Over and over again, you built sales teams. What is the biggest mistake to avoid?
Don’t hire successful and experienced salespeople too early. In the beginning, hire talents that can grow with the organization. The reason is that if you hire people with a very impressive CV who already had plenty of success, these people often aren’t that hungry anymore and are used to a certain level of corporate services. They will tell you, look, this slide needs to be modified – instead of doing what needs to be done themselves. So what you want to look for instead are people that have the skills necessary to sell, of course. There is a lot of talent, often in corporate positions where they can’t really use all of their skill and energy. Hiring from services firms has turned out to be a good idea too. In the US, for example, we worked with Michael Page to help us find talent. At one point I asked our contact person there if she would consider joining us. She took the risk of joining an unknown startup and became a top-performing saleswoman. This being said, at a certain point in the development of the organization, say, when you’re more than 10 people in sales, you do want to hire a senior and experienced person to successfully manage the team.

Why did you leave Akeneo and the whole team you assembled to join Artifakt?
A successful startup at one point reaches the inevitable phase when it cannot fail anymore. You have 200 employees, 15 million of ARR, are worth 200 million Euro, this kind of size. This is the “Excel” phase when management skills start to be more important and leadership by example is replaced by management by objectives. This is not what I enjoy most…

….which is…?
…building things from scratch instead of managing them, an intense period that necessitates complete engagement, the flexibility to travel all around the world all the time, which often people lose after they turn 40 and have kids. I love this, and when Aymeric Aitamer, the co-founder of Artifakt asked me if I wanted to join his small team and do once over again what I did with Akeneo, I said yes, of course!

You joined Artifakt in April 2020. Was that bad timing?
Yes and no. 2020 is a challenging year, no doubt, you cannot easily travel and many big companies have frozen their investment spending. At the same time, we achieved record numbers in Q2. We experience a very strong tailwind from the push to digitalization that Covid-19 caused. For many of our brick-and-mortar clients, before this crisis, the e-commerce portal was an afterthought that generated just a fraction of their sales. All of a sudden, it has become their main source of income, and during forced closures, the only one. This changes the game completely. In the past, you could get by with local hosting and a handcrafted approach. Now, if there are hundreds of thousands of visitors to your e-commerce site, there are completely different needs in terms of scalability and security. You need to harness the power of cloud computing and Artifakt enables them to do so. It’s industrialization instead of hand-built solutions. We make cloud computing as easily available to companies as electricity. That’s our value proposition, and I strongly believe in it.

Can you give me a concrete example?
One of our happy customers is Bricorama, a home improvement retailer. They have around 100 stores in France alone and also an online store. Before they became our clients they used a private service provider and host. When Covid-19 hit, their website traffic increased 20-fold. The hosting company could simply not keep up with it. Instead, they implemented a queuing system. Customers had to wait up to 45 minutes in order to access the website and make a purchase. Imagine that! As soon as they started to use Artifakt, Bricorama benefited from our auto-scaling-feature which guarantees stable performance and service quality no matter the usage level. This resulted in a sales increase of more than EUR 200’000 per day.

Let’s come back to your sales strategy. During your time at Akeneo, you established an important partnership channel. Will you repeat that for Artifakt, too?
Of course, web agencies are a very important channel for us because they are at the same time users of our software and those who will suggest to their clients that they should work with us. And why should these clients not trust their advice? So both from an awareness and business perspective, web agencies are essential partners for us and will bring a large part of leads, also, because they are regionally close to their clients and will help us expand internationally. We still have work to do, build a partner portal, for example. Nevertheless, some partnerships are already in place and prove to be successful. We teamed up with the Magento integrators Lumao, for instance, and they’ve already brought us half a dozen clients. And we also started our internationalization with a first client in Ireland, and shortly one in the US.

Artifakt is backed by successful French tech entrepreneurs, which includes the founders of Akeneo. How relevant is that for you?
First of all, this shows that Artifakt’s solution is valid from a technical standpoint because as you said, they’re tech entrepreneurs. I think it was very clever of Aymeric, Artifakt’s co-founder, to surround himself with more experienced entrepreneurs, not just the founders of Akeneo, but also of Algolia and Criteo, which have different experiences. As they all work with agencies, it could of course also provide a useful network to tap into in the future as Artifakt grows.